'There is a listening fear in their regard'
as he speaks, saying, 'When He giveth quietness, who then can make trouble?' A lovely marginal illustration shows, as it were, the beginning of a new hope. From the prostrate figure of the saint, on whose bosom hope seems to lie dead, there is a gradual lifting-up of little angel-thoughts which, rising higher and higher, at last disappear on their way to the throne of God. There follows a subject of amazing grandeur—God speaks out of the incumbent wreaths of the whirlwind; and in the outer space there are sketchings that seem to represent the very roots of creation, while its boiling energies appear to overflow above. Now the elder sons of God sing together with clapping wings among the studded stars; the Almighty spreads His arms of command, and the coursers of the morning leap forth; the silent-rushing dragons of the night issue into its purple hollows, and, as it were, hidden in 'a vacant interlunar cave,' Job and his friends behold and meditate on these things. And again on other wonders: Behemoth tramps the earth; Leviathan wallows in the deep. Then, farther on, 'Satan falls as lightning from heaven;' the shadows flee; the sweet returns of the Divine favour brighten on the head of Job, while they flash condemnation on the heads of his sceptical friends. Still farther, the altar of grateful sacrifice sends its pyramid of flame into the heaven of heavens.
In the border of this invention are drawn, curiously enough, a palette and pencils and a graver. We never see this without surmising some personal allusion in it, and thinking of George Herbert's poem of The Flower—
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'Who would have thought my shrivelled heart |
